They use trains to get the ore to port in Wisconsin in the first place. They could just as easily deliver it to a river port on the Illinois side as to Duluth. From what I understand, it is actually more of a barge canal, not one for ships. So any real ships would have to transfer there anyway, since there is no way a seven hundred foot ore carrier is going through the Chicago canal onto a river. And the great lakes are way to rough to pull barges meant for rivers.

This... anonymous or not, deserves upward moderation. The non-natural Chicago canal is where they will come from. If and when they come, the carp have the potential to destroy at a minimum a 7 billion dollar industry. Chicago says they need the waterway to allow iron ore shipments, but there other ways to ship the ore which needs to be delivered to wherever it is loaded onto boats in the first place. i.e. they can deliver it to the Illinois River instead of to the great lakes and then via the canal.

I worked at companies where this happened. I was lucky in that I worked on R&D code and didn't have to use the company's specialized constructs. Others who didn't have this luxury had hard times finding work when major projects finished because employers in the area knew these people didn't have readily transferable skills. It is the same policy of opening shops up in remote areas where they company is the only horse in a one horse town. If they leave, no one is employed so everyone has to eat the shit they are fed. And the latter is not limited to IT companies, it is used by many. It is why Walgrens and Walmart locate their shipping centres in the middle of nowhere. So that they have leverage over the employees.

This weekend I think I heard that they ar rreporting 7000 died so far. I think they owe it to everyone to tell us what they really think the number is. Otherwise what are we paying them so much for. We could hire monkeys if all we wanted was to report numbers from countries in "image damage control."

There are a lot of people who have realized that simply throwing money at problems in Africa doesn't help. Lately, a lot of them are African. People are recognizing that given one or the other, the "teach a man to fish" adage is the only effective way to help. The problem is that normally the money doesn't go where it will help the most. And from what I've seen NGOs don't always know the best places. If they did, there probably wouldn't be any more poverty there.

We develop lots of technologies all the time that go from the lab and into the open market in less time then this.

OK, name a few that have the same complexity as manufacturing and using graphene.

The writing recognition software on my 10.1 2014 tablet works better for me when I use cursive than printing. Mind you it has made me neaten up my writing, but even before I did, it got less wrong when I 'wrote' rather than printed.

My guess is you must not have liked finding out you were wrong. Imagine finding out that sapphire is actually a mineral. Where did you go to school, Under Rock High?

After the big bang and evolution big bombs the Pope just laid out this past summer/fall (he believes in them), I wonder what his take on this would be. Seeing as how this stupid woman used 'being a catholic' as an excuse to do it. There are some hints already that he thinks contraception is not necessarily a bad thing. Granted he didn't get all he wanted at this years synod, but he is a relatively young Pope and if he can avoid being poisoned, or some other "sickness" from schemers (I don't doubt they would resort to this in their still medieval world and power structure), I bet there is a good chance it will be revisited. He is also against using religious beliefs and the catholic church as a means to achieve political power; which from what I understand has pissed off a lot of Bishops and Cardinals who likely have profited from using this as a tool for their "success".

It's a freaking type of gemstone. It's blue... so when you see the blue gemstones on jewel encrusted whatevers, they'd be the sapphire ones. Have you been living under a rock? Yes, it can be made artificially and is very hard. It is why the best watch crystals are made of sapphire.

What's more, even if the seek time is very slow, once done it can go back in time so that it actually seems very, very fast.

And then we can slowly pull the cards out of the slots while the computer sings Bicycle Built For Two in ever slower verses.

Depends on your definition of state.

...monkey boy!

Relatively speaking? Yes.